Hello and welcome to Comic Drake where I talk about comic books and my name is Drake!
Nico Minoru A.K.A.
Sister Grimm is one of the most popular members of The Runaways team and in fact, she has
made more appearances in non Runaways comics than any other member of the team and also,
she is one of the most well known Japanese characters that Marvel has going for them,
but who is she?
What’s she all about?
Well I’m going to take her complete history and try to condense it down so this is going
to be fun.
Throughout her life, Nico Minoru was forced to attend “charity events” with her parents
where she became acquaintances with the children of her parents’ associates that were forced
to do the same.
Well one year, things changed when Alex Wilder, the son of the event’s host, revealed that
he found a secret passage in his home and suggests that the kids go spy on their parents.
After peeping in, the children discovered that their parents made up a criminal organization
called The Pride which ruled the criminal underground of Los Angeles.
If that wasn't bad enough, they were performing dark rituals and the kids watched them murder
a teenage girl.
Clearly this shocked the kids and they did the smart thing by reporting this to the police,
but many of the officers were on The Pride’s payroll and stonewalled them.
This prompted the kids to break into their parent’s offices and files to find out as
much information as they could by themselves, but The Pride quickly found out what their
offspring was up to.
When attempting to subdue her daughter, Nico’s mother attempted to strike her with a magic
staff, but instead, Nico absorbed it!
This is The Staff of One, a powerful magical relic that emerges whenever Nico bleeds.
And yes perverts, her period can also summon the staff.
That is literally a plot point that has been established…
Anyway, the more blood that is shed, the stronger the spells, but there IS a catch.
Nico can only use each spell one time.
With Nico’s magic and the gifts that each of the other children discovered they had,
they successfully escaped their parents and Nico began a relationship with Alex.
So where would this team of Runaways live?
Well thankfully one member of the team, Chase Stein, the idiot son of mad scientists, had
a secret cave that he would slink off to wherever he wanted to be alone and this made for a
great team base!
Now that they were on their own, The Runaways decided to abandon their names and instead
strictly referred to each other by new self-assigned codenames.
Nico’s was Sister Grimm… after her AIM handle...
Which wow, it seriously dates this book…
Regardless, you don’t need to worry about how cringy all of this sounds because after
not too long, the entire team dropped the codenames altogether.
Things between Nico and Alex got a bit complicated when Nico kissed Topher, a vampire who briefly
joined The Runaways before revealing himself to be SUPER FREAKING EVIL, but the final nail
in their relationship’s coffin was when Alex came out as a traitor and that he had
been working with The Pride the entire time.
See, The Pride was working for some evil god… things… who were going to destroy the world
and despite the fact that there were twelve members of The Pride, the evil gods only offered
sanctuary for six.
The Pride decided that they’d give up their chance of being saved in exchange for their
children getting their spots.
However, with Alex’s help, his and Nico’s parents were going to turn on the rest of
The Pride and steal their spots and planned to use the last two for the kids.
Alex tried convincing Nico to come along, but she rejected it.
Nico and the other Runaways stopped the ritual that would bring the gods to power who needless
to say were SUPER displeased and expressed it by instantly killing Alex.
In fact, they were going to take everyone out, but in one last fit of parental love,
The Pride sacrificed themselves so that their children could escape.
As soon as they got away though, Captain America found The Runaways and put them into foster
homes.
Well The Runaways managed to…run away… from their new homes and Nico took over as
the team’s leader as they lived on the run.
During this time, Nico tried multiple times to bring Alex back to life despite the fact
that he broke her heart and betrayed the entire team, but very time, she failed.
Regardless, things went pretty smoothly for the team until a future version of one of
their teammates, Gertrude, came back in time to warn The Runaways of a powerful villain
named Victor Mancha before promptly dying.
The Runaways tracked Victor down, but he ended up actually being a real nice kid despite
the fact that he couldn’t control his blossoming electrical powers.
Victor ended up joining the team after discovering that his father is the killer robot Ultron
and helped the team take him out.
Okay so now that we’ve introduced Victor, let’s get serious for a moment.
Nico has a lot to deal with when it comes to relationships.
In fact, under times of great stress or mourning, she typically seeks out physical comfort such
as when she started sleeping with Victor after Gertrude was killed in the present by a new
incarnation of The Pride.
Following the New Pride’s defeat, The Runaways were roped into working for The Kingpin which
involved them stealing a time machine and accidentally getting displaced to the 1900’s.
It was here that Nico was kidnapped by a woman named the Witchbreaker who turned out to be
her great-grandmother.
The Witchbreaker tortured and trained Nico which GREATLY increased her powers and even
gave her the ability to cast minor spells without her staff.
After managing to return to the present though, The Runaways moved into one of their parent’s
last uncompromised bases.
However pretty much as soon as they move in, some members of one of The Runaways’ fellow
alien race was trying to bring her back to be put in trial for her parent’s crimes.
These guys were tough, but Nico was able to buy the entire team some time by using a scatter
spell to teleport the aliens all across Earth.
Unfortunately though, while this spell physically scattered her enemies, it emotionally scattered
The Runaways.
Although they worked through their problems enough to take the aliens down and embark
on several other misadventures, Nico’s spell and honestly, the usual angst/hormone compound
that come with being a teenager drove the entire team apart.
However, the biggest blow was when Chase and Nico were kidnapped by a villain named Arcade
who pushed them to their limits.
You see, Nico and Chase were two of sixteen superpowered teenagers that were put into
a place called Murderworld by a villain named Arcade.
It’s a Battle Royale/Hunger Games inspired deathmatch where only one was to remain standing
after thirty days of hell.
For the first couple of weeks, Nico and Chase really didn’t do much.
They made a camp and defended it well, but the lack of sleep and food forced them to
make an alliance with the kids from Avengers Academy.
Food became the ultimate bargaining chip so Nico enchanted a tree to produce fruit every
eight hours that’s high in protein, vitamin rich, and tastes better than anything found
on Earth!
This was enough to grant the two Runaways protection in the Avengers Academy camp, but
Chase was convinced that they would kill them in their sleep.
Well thankfully, the fruit was too damn good for the cadets to do anything other than eat
and eat and eat.
This alliance went well until Chase was framed to make it look like he attacked one of his
new allies, causing his new friends to kill the tree and cast them out.
However, this didn’t matter too much since the remaining survivors ultimately all needed
to work together against one of the contestants who decided to make herself into the villain
of the game, a technomancer named Apex.
Well… her and her non-psychotic twin brother that inhabits the same body… because comics...
Now this threw the survivors in a bit of a pickle.
Now clearly, killing Apex would save the most lives, but at the same time, her twin brother
inside was completely innocent.
Chase was all for killing them while Nico was not, prompting her to kick Chase out of
the alliance altogether.
Here’s the downside though.
During this battle royale, Chase had obtained the powerful Darkhawk armor which Apex was
able to fully take over and she used it to have Chase literally chop off part of Nico’s
arm, break the Staff of One, KICK HER OFF A MOUNTAIN, break her leg, and straight up
bleed to death.
But here’s the thing.
Nico is witch who uses blood magic so this is oddly enough the best way for her to die
since the more blood she sheds, the better.
In fact, this was so much blood that despite the staff shattering, it reformed, brought
Nico back to life, gave her a badass magic arm gauntlet thing, and made her more powerful
than ever before!
This power boost gave the kids an edge over Apex and they seemingly killed her, but on
the last day of the battle royale, thing kind of went kind of insane with the remaining
survivors turning on each other before Arcade was taken out behind the scenes.
With Arcade out of the picture, the survivors make it out and form a pact to not speak about
what happened on Murderworld…
That is until Arcade uploaded the video footage to YouTube…
But hey, you shouldn’t give supervillains views because that is just majorly unfriendly.
You should subscribe to quality content creators like me!
...That was a pause for you to click subscribe.
Anyway, Nico grew SUPER distant after her month in hell was passed around all over the
internet, but when the Murderworld survivors were framed for killing Arcade, they banded
together one last time in order to redeem themselves…
Yep, these teens became new members of the Masters of Evil which includes such members
as Daimon Hellstrom, the literal son of Satan, who offered to train Nico in the ways of dark
magic, but if that wasn’t enough, Daimon also resurrects Alex Wilder to help out with
the training who Nico briefly hate banged.
The Murderworld survivors worked with the Masters of Evil for three months until they
successfully brought them down after which, Nico finally started re-bonding with The Runaways.
In fact, Nico started taking positive steps towards reintegrating herself with society
and even tried growing closer with her remaining non-evil family over in Japan.
That honestly went pretty well until some female superheroes ended up crashing her cousin’s
wedding.
These women went on to become a super team called A-Force which Nico also ended up becoming
a founding member of.
This team was led by Carol Danvers A.K.A.
Captain Marvel which means that when Carol started the second superhuman civil war against
Iron Man, you KNOW that Nico had to get involved.
This conflict started when Captain Marvel started using an Inhuman with the ability
to see the future in order to prevent crimes before they even happen.
Of course, teammates are no exception so when it was discovered that Nico was going to apparently
kill someone in the future, Cap wanted to preemptively detain her.
Well…
Nico was not a fan of that which prompted a small story about self fulfilling prophecies
and that kind of stuff.
The thing is, despite the fact that Nico ended up being fine after it was revealed that this
supposed future murder was a bit of a misunderstanding, this still hurt her already prominent trust
issues and A-Force as a whole ended up disbanding almost as quickly as it formed.
These days, Nico is cut off from pretty much everyone and her magic arm was fixed off panel
with no given explanation.
Thing have finally started to change though when Chase busts into her apartment with Gertrude’s
body.
It turns out that Chase went back in time to the exact moment that Gert was being killed,
forcing Nico to work her magic and save her life.
With Gert back in their lives, it’s finally time to get The Runaways back together and
give Nico one last shot at fixing her life as well as her personal relationships and
as of the time of this recording, that is EVERYTHING that we know.
I know that was a LOT to go through so I hope that made some sort of sense after being condensed
down so much, but of course, these videos would not be possible without all of our amazing
supporters over on Patreon.
Badasses like Ashley Donson, Bonnie Davies, David Flores, Yosh Flores, Taylor Adams, Leonardo,
Dylan Svedik, Sebastian Walker, and Jared Rieker!
Thank you guys very much and you can see even more names of our supporters down there in
the description below!
But if you liked this video then you probably like The Runaways so why don’t you watch
our complete history on the team done in much the same fashion as this one and maybe you
can give us a like or subscribe if you want to stay updated with all of our content.
Please?
It’d be nice.
Hopefully I’ll see you next time!